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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Š Michael Hutchinson, 2017 Michael Hutchinson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4729-2559-6 ePub: 978-1-4729-2561-9 Typeset in Minion by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.
R e :C yclists 200 Years on Two Wheels
Michael Hutchinson
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
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Contents
Introduction: A Man Walks into a Bar 1 1817: The Big Bang 2 The 1860s: Parisian Perversions and the World’s First Bicycle Race 3 The Dignity of the Victorian Clubmen 4 1870–1900: American Cycling and the Genius of Colonel Albert Pope 5 1874: The Honourable Ion Keith-Falconer 6 Safety Bicycles and Extreme Danger: Mile-a-Minute Murphy and the Lion’s Den 7 The 1890s: The Great Society Cycling Craze 8 Twentieth-Century Racing and the Loneliness of the Time Triallists 9 1900–1920: Cycling and Moting 10 1920–1958: The Tourists
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1 11 33 57 83 95 111 135 160 174 197
Contents
11 1942–1959: The British League of Racing Cyclists 12 1957: ‘Most of Our People Have Never Had it so Good’ 13 1960–1990: An Ugley Situation 14 1992–2016: The Life of Lottery 15 Towards a Cycling Tomorrow
216 248 261 278 308
Endnotes 321 Acknowledgements 336 Index 338
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Introduction
A Man Walks into a Bar
Many of life’s defining moments pass almost unnoticed at the time. It often takes weeks or months or longer for the significance of a chance meeting or an unexpected phone call to become clear. When an unfamiliar girl at college put her head round the door of my room to ask me to turn the music down, it was not immediately apparent that we would be spending the next twenty-something years living together. Instead I scowled and told her that I turned down the towering genius of Leonard Cohen for no one, least of all Abba-fancying philistines like her. She rolled her eyes and slammed the door, and I think we probably both assumed that that was that. Some pivotal events, on the other hand, are hard to miss. Take what happened to me around lunchtime on 6 June 1999, for instance. 1
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I’d just finished riding a National Championship bike race in North Yorkshire. It was a warm summer day, and it had been a hot race. I was tired and a bit dehydrated. I was also very, very pleased with myself, because I’d just finished fifth, only a few seconds off the podium, which had been my best result in that race to date and had been the result of a very carefully planned campaign and a lot of hard work. I was, therefore, cheerful, satisfied, perhaps even a little smug and generally in the highest of spirits as I walked into the pub where I was staying to collect the key to my room from behind the bar. I had come straight from the race. To be specific about it, I was wearing a time-trial helmet with a large point at the back and a mirrored visor at the front. I was still in my racing skinsuit, which was exceptionally tight and, in the whiter bits at least, had a pinkish translucence. My smoothly shaved legs ended at a pair of shiny silver cycling shoes, the futuristic-superhero effect of which was undermined by the hard carbon-fibre soles that meant I had to walk in very tiny steps to avoid slipping on the stone floor. The bar was packed for Sunday lunch. The loud ‘clackclack’ that accompanied every mincing step meant that heads started to turn. Then conversations petered out. Forks stopped halfway to mouths. Behind the bar, beer poured unwatched over the rims of glasses and into driptrays. It wasn’t the sort of pub people played darts in at
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lunchtime, but if it had been, the darts would presumably have stopped in mid-air. It felt like the special videoeffect where the people freeze-frame and the camera pans around them. I clacked across the unnaturally quiet bar, and asked the landlord for the key to room three. He took it off a peg and set it on the counter. Then, in a moment of exuberance, I said, ‘And a pint of Theakston’s XB, please.’ I suppose the idea was that this would break the tension, everyone would laugh and smile and perhaps I’d be hoisted aloft and carried in celebration around the bar. That did not happen. I still looked the way David Bowie would have looked in the mid-1970s if his alter egos had been designed by a focus group, except that now I had to stand at the bar and drink a pint in a calm, unhurried fashion. People told their children to stop staring at me, even as they held their own gazes on me steady and unabashed. I still didn’t care. For probably the first time in a rather self-conscious life I was quite happy to look the fool. That morning, perhaps during the race, perhaps on the ride back the couple of miles from the finish-line to the pub, perhaps just as I crossed the bar, a real pride in being a cyclist had sprung up in me. I loved what I did, and I loved all the people I did it with. Anyone who didn’t like looking at odd strands of my body hair through the pinkish bits of my tight, tight suit could get knotted. I
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stood there and lifted my pint with an air of, ‘One day, my friends, you will all be like me.’ I was right, and everyone else was wrong. It felt magnificent. What can I say? Adrenaline and jubilation can do terrible, terrible things to people. If I wasn’t embarrassed then, I certainly was later. But the pride was real. I was a cyclist, and there was nothing else I’d rather have been. That’s still very much the case. I wasn’t born a cyclist. I didn’t come from a cycling family, nor did I take it up young. I came to it late, and entirely by accident. My girlfriend’s father had lent me one of his racing bikes and suggested I might enjoy a spin. Within about ten miles I felt ready to devote the rest of my life to riding bikes. I spent a blissful summer riding it for miles round London’s parks, or out of the city into Surrey or Sussex, just wearing a running vest and a pair of old rugby shorts and having the time of my life. My happiness was only increased when I started racing and discovered that, not only did I like it, I was good at it. I read magazines and books; I went to stand on chilly roadsides to be a third of the two-men-and-adog who traditionally watched British races. I went from neophyte to dyed-in-the-wool bikie in about six months. There was nothing about cycling that wasn’t exciting, nothing I didn’t want to do. Cycling does this to people, and I’m not surprised. To sit on something as simple and brilliant as a bike is
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to become a better, faster, nimbler version of yourself. A bike isn’t artificial. It doesn’t separate you from your surroundings. It is very much whatever you want it to be. There are surveys that claim to have identified anything up to 60 different sorts of bike rider – from full-gas racer to someone riding to a village shop, to an urban cyclist whose idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon is putting on a vintage racing-jersey and going to sit with their bike at a table outside a café. You can even switch from one type to another with nothing other than a change of purpose – I’ve probably been most of the sixty at one time or another, and often several within the space of a single ride. I don’t think it would be possible for me to stop being a cyclist. Even if I never rode a bike again, I think I’d still be a cyclist before I was anything else. I’ve made my living in cycling. It was never part of my life plan, but how could I resist the opportunity? What on earth else would I prefer to do? I raced professionally for several years, and when that ran out I started writing for a cycling magazine. The magazine was Cycling Weekly, which was first published as Cycling in 1891, just as the penny-farthing era was ending and the safety bicycle was taking over. With all due respect to my colleagues, by some distance the best thing about their office was their archive. Other than the odd Christmas, the magazine hasn’t missed a week in well over a hundred years. The copies
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are bound into large six-month volumes. I used to sink into one of those like a time traveller. I could spend an afternoon that had been earmarked for something a bit more useful working my way through a random interwar year, following the fortunes of the racers, the journeys of the touring correspondents, the arguments about bike lanes, compulsory lights and even helmets. There was something special about seeing the past through the eyes of people just like me, people who were first and foremost cyclists. Their concerns were sometimes very modernfeeling, while their worlds were rather different. It was nice to have a familiar perspective from which to look at the past. The magazines always referred to their remit as ‘the sport and pastime of cycling’. It’s an unfussy phrase that crops up again and again. It sounds like it ought to be in the text for some sort of sermon: the two sides of cycling, often the concerns of the same riders, the same clubs, the same writers. It tidily gathers together all that was and is best about riding a bike, both the fury of competition and the pleasure of time wasted well. That’s where my fascination with my predecessors came from, and why I wanted to know more about them. This is a personal history, and I mean that in two ways. I mean it in the normal style, in that it’s a history guided entirely by my own curiosity. But I also mean it in the sense that it’s a history of people like me. People who
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raced, people who regarded a ride with a friend on a sunny summer afternoon as something close to perfection, and even people who worked for cycling magazines and managed to pull their noses out of the archive for long enough to actually do some work. The fascination has been with cyclists, not with bicycles. I’m as keen on a moodily lit close-up photograph of a 1963 Campagnolo Record rear derailleur as any other right-thinking person. I once expressed my admiration for an elderly, monolingual Italian man’s beautiful old Cinelli SuperCorsa through the medium of mime and did so with such vigour that he tightened his grip on it and shouted for help at the top of his voice. I’ve even ridden old bikes at vintage rallies. I’ve gone the whole way and done it in period costume. But I still always want to come back to the riders, not their bicycles. On a vintage rally, there is a wondrous sense of timelessness about standing by a country road in a tweed suit trying to repair a puncture with a vintage bicycle pump. You know what it was like for the bike’s first owner, you know how it felt, you know just what sort of language he resorted to and you know that however hard he tried, it was impossible to hurl a 30lb roadster far enough to give any real sense of closure. There are certainly points in the history of cyclists where the state of the technology mattered more than others. It’s especially the case in the early years. Things
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like the change from the penny-farthing to the safety bicycle in the 1880s had profound consequences for who could ride, and where they could go. But, overall, the most remarkable thing about bicycles is not how much they’ve changed, but how little. If you ride a bike from 120 years ago, the differences are of refinement and cosmetics. So I haven’t dwelled for any longer than seemed necessary on the mysteries of different steel alloys or the fascinating and vexed question of who first built a bicycle with ball-bearings. Cyclists have always been fond of decrying others as ‘not a proper cyclist’. I’ve been happy to accept a sort of self-selection. A cyclist is anyone who calls themselves a cyclist, for whom the sport and the pastime was or is part of their identity. It’s a definition that means that I haven’t really looked at utility cycling, cycling purely for transport. For most of cycling’s history, those who rode for simple transport didn’t look on cycling as part of who they were at all, any more than someone who gets the train to work counts themselves a trainspotter. And in this context, I happily accept I’m the man in the cagoule standing at the end of the platform with a flask and a notepad. It’s a good time to be a cyclist-spotter. Numbers are increasing, the sport and the pastime has become a more aspirational activity than it has been for a century. Although over-confidence is a perpetual risk – there’s
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such a thing as a warning from history, and there’s also such a thing as a warning from history books. One of the unvarying features of all the cycling histories I’ve ever read is that they finish with a chapter called something like ‘Towards a Cycling Tomorrow!’ which confidently claims that cycling is poised to take over the world. I think it’s always going to be more complicated than that, but I think it’s not too much of a risk to say that things for cyclists are better than they have been for quite a long time. Another reason it’s a good time to be a cyclist-spotter is that there are a lot of people to talk to about it. While there is a bit of uncertainty about the very beginnings of cycling, most of the years of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were very well documented – there were countless books and magazines, accounts of everything from the races to the grand tours of Europe that aristocratic cyclists made. As cycling matured and changed in the twentieth century, these died out. By the middle of the century, other than Cycling magazine, there is not a great deal to be found. Happily, since old cyclists never die (that’s not the set-up for a joke, they just don’t), I’ve been able to talk to a lot of them about the neglected years. I’ve enjoyed every conversation, every hour spent with an old book or magazine or photo album. I’ve found out more about some of my old heroes, and discovered
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a few new ones. The experience has made me feel even more like a cyclist than I did before, and prouder to be part of the story. If, when I walked into that Yorkshire pub, I had felt the way about cycling that I do now, I’d probably have declared a round for the whole bar. Which would have made the moment when I remembered that the contents of my skinsuit didn’t include a wallet even more memorable for all concerned.
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1817: The Big Bang
It all started with a volcano. And what a volcano it was. Every bicycle and every rider that the world has ever seen has its genesis in recorded history’s biggest bang. Mount Tambora in Indonesia was the volcano in question. In April 1815 it did not so much erupt as explode – and with such violence that it blew more than 24 cubic miles of rock and ash into the sky. The mountain’s height was reduced by almost 5,000 feet. It was an entire order of magnitude bigger than its more famous neighbour Krakatoa. You could have heard it 1,600 miles away, which is further than the distance from London to Istanbul. As if the event hadn’t been hard enough to miss already, it changed the weather. Ash and sulfur dioxide thrown into the atmosphere caused a dramatic fall in
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global temperatures,1 leaving 1816 as ‘the year without a summer’. Harvests failed. There were food riots across Europe. Red snow fell on Italy. Brown snow fell on Hungary. A disastrous crop failure in Ireland precipitated a typhus outbreak that killed an estimated 100,000 people. There were floods, avalanches, famine, and civil unrest across the world. Still, it wasn’t all bad news. All those wonderful pictures J. M. W. Turner painted with the hazy yelloworange skies were apparently not the result of his imagination, but a reasonably faithful reproduction of the effects of ash in the atmosphere. At a washout of a summer house-party in Switzerland the guests were reduced to the indoor amusement of a competition to write a scary story. What sounds like the parlour game from hell produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and a short story by Lord Byron that went on to inspire the modern mythology of the vampire. And in the cold and damp of a German forest, a man accidentally invented the bicycle, or, at any rate, something very close to the bicycle. His name was by some distance the finest in the history of cycling: Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn, which would have been quite a handful to paint on the frames of his machines had it been the custom at the time. He’s generally known as Baron von Drais. It’s still enough to give you an urge
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to don a silk scarf and a monocle and start shooting down Sopwith Camels. In 1816 von Drais was a senior forestry official in Baden – a position of some considerable status. When the effects of Tambora made themselves apparent he was faced with a sudden dearth of horses. They starved for lack of food and were, in their turn, eaten by the foresters, also for lack of food. We don’t know whether the invention came about simply because von Drais was looking for an alternative means of personal transport or, whether in the absence of horses to drag felled trees, he was looking for a way to move logs out of the forests, and tried attaching wheels to them, discovering when he did so that if you could steer the front wheel then you could balance successfully on the log. Whichever it was, the result was the ‘draisine’ (also known as the ‘hobby-horse’, the ‘dandy-horse’, the ‘running machine’, the ‘Laufmaschine’, or even, in an early swing at naming-it-like-you-want-to-sell-it, the ‘pedestrian curricle’). It was, as you’d expect from a machine born in a forest, essentially a wooden beam with two fore-and-aft cartwheels attached. You sat astride it and pushed it along with your feet, in much the same manner as a toddler learning to ride a modern balance bike. It wasn’t, in truth, all that marvellous as a means of transport. Even staying upright on the rutted roads of
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the early nineteenth century was a challenge. One of von Drais’s early rides of ten miles took him an hour – which wasn’t at all bad – but he could only manage to ride ten miles at all because he’d sought out the smoothest road his home town of Mannheim had to offer.2 On most roads walking would be just as fast, and would leave you in a less dishevelled state for doing whatever it was you were planning to do when you reached your destination. The draisine wasn’t the very first human-powered vehicle, not by many centuries. It’s just that most of its predecessors had even greater issues of practicality. Litters and sedan chairs dated back several thousand years, but really only worked with a ready supply of slaves, which had issues of sustainability as a means of mass transport due to the problem of how the slaves themselves were going to get to work. An even more grotesque human-powered carriage was the work of a German called Jean Hautsch. In the 1660s he designed a carriage for the King of Denmark that was powered by small children concealed within the structure. It seems likely that it was intended to be no more than a curiosity, and, since its means of propulsion was not visible to an onlooker, maybe provide a bit of a puzzle. A witness claimed it was capable of 3,000 paces in an hour, presumably something in the region of 2 mph, which, given the machine’s likely bulk, says something for the stamina of Danish children.
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And so it went on. Through the eighteenth century there were numerous carriages propelled by adult servants, jumping up and down on cranked axles, winding with their arms, while their master steered and (perhaps) provided encouragement. They all suffered from the basic defect that they were essentially four-wheeled horsedrawn carriages, retaining all the accompanying size and weight. All that had really changed was that the horses were replaced by a couple of grooms or footmen capable of providing only a fraction of the power, even in the unlikely event that they were enthusiastic about jumping up and down on the axle of a carriage while onlookers stared and sniggered. Accounts of these machines are not always very reliable. A French inventor called Blanchard said he had used a horseless carriage of his own design to give Benjamin Franklin a ride from Paris to Versailles while Franklin was serving as the American ambassador to France. The inventor claimed it had taken him just an hour and three-quarters for the trip, which would have been an impressive 12 kph or thereabouts. But it seems telling that Franklin appears never to have mentioned his trip to anyone, nor to have expressed much subsequent interest in horseless carriages. The inventor’s claims came only 15 years after Franklin had died, which seems, under the circumstances, relevant to any weighing of the evidence.3
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What made the draisine different from all the foregoing was its lightness – it was more like a grown-up’s version of a children’s toy than an attempt to find a way for a man to do the work of a horse. When von Drais started selling his machines, unlike their ridiculous ancestors they actually enjoyed a certain level of popularity. Von Drais took it quickly to Paris, which was the California of the early nineteenth century as far as getting a fad off the ground was concerned. After a disastrous start, where he omitted to check that the servant employed to demonstrate the machine could actually ride it, he managed to build up a certain interest. He was mocked by some, applauded by others, and he cultivated a takeup of the draisine among precisely the sort of young men who two centuries later would buy little fold-up scooters, Segways and hoverboards. In a foretaste of exactly how popular cyclists were going to be for the subsequent two hundred years, the draisine was hated wherever it went. The problem was the roads. Rutted by cartwheels, pocked by horses’ hooves, even if it wasn’t covered in mud, an early nineteenth-century road was not, with a few exceptions, a very inviting place to ride an iron-tyred lump of wood. So the dandies who bought them moved onto the pavements and the park paths, which were much smoother, and where it was possible to build up more speed. Much more. By 1819, draisines were banned
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from all or part of Milan, New York, London, Paris and even Calcutta.4 There was less actual mockery than you might have expected. The general view, even from establishment commentators, seems to have been one of mild curiosity, perhaps even mixed with a little enthusiasm. One Parisian journal let fly with, ‘Long live this worthy Baron von Drais to whom we owe such novel pleasures! . . . Be quick to sharpen your pens, you chroniclers of fashion!’5 In a way it was the ‘fashion’ bit of that which condemned the draisine in Paris. It never got past being a novelty. You could rent them at the pleasure gardens, and they were ridden in theatrical shows. They were probably closer to a skateboard in terms of practical transport than they were to a modern bike. Baron von Drais continued to earnestly conduct forestry inspections on his, while everyone else who rode a draisine was using it for a bit of fun, maybe to impress their friends, and not much more. The invention was viewed less indulgently elsewhere. When the draisine arrived in England, the first thing that happened was that von Drais got royally done over by Denis Johnson, a London coachbuilder, who essentially stole the draisine idea, patented it, improved it by making the frame out of iron rather than wood, and made a small fortune selling them to Regency dandies of the type ridiculed in Blackadder the Third.
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The second thing that happened in London was that, unlike their French counterparts, the English commentators were not curious, nor were they even mildly enthusiastic. Street urchins and newspaper caricaturists and every other variety of opinion-former were of one mind on the draisine: they pointed and laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks. There was enough interest for Johnson to start two riding schools, and for the authorities to feel it was necessary to ban draisines from the pavements, but the craze was a shortlived one, because no one in London had a skin thick enough to persist with it. It was the same in the US. The Baltimore Telegraph noted the arrival in its bailiwick of ‘a curious twowheeled device called a velocipede . . . which is propelled by jackasses instead of horses’6, and that just about said it all. There were one or two signs of the machine’s possible worth, and of its descendants’ glorious future, not least among them the very considerable feat of athleticism that allowed a draisine rider to beat a coach from London to Brighton.7 But by 1819, after just two years, it was all over. In the end, the draisine died of mockery. Von Drais himself died in penury. He kept inventing, and displayed no small talent for it – he came up with the first typewriter with a keyboard, a stenograph, a device for recording piano music onto paper, and a human-
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powered railcar that he felt might be useful to passengers who had missed a train and wished to pursue it, and didn’t care how ridiculous they looked while doing so. But he was commercially witless, and managed to avoid making a living from any of these ideas, including the original draisine, which was too easy to copy and too easy to improve. He was in an even more precarious position after his father died in 1839. Politically naïve, he got himself on the losing side of a revolution by renouncing his title to align himself with the republicans, only for the royalists to win. The father of the two-wheeler only avoided by a whisker being locked up for insanity, and died penniless in 1851 at the age of 66.8 Unfortunately the draisine was almost totally ignored for the next four decades. The development of the steam locomotive and the public railways during the first half of the nineteenth century revolutionised transport, and generated huge excitement in the idea of travel as something that wasn’t profoundly uncomfortable, dangerous and totally dependent on horses. The world was so thrilled by the possibilities of large-scale engi neering that no one really got back to looking at the simple, lightweight, inexpensive draisine. It’s a very strange kink in history that the steam train and the railways predated the pedal bicycle in their invention, especially since the bicycle requires almost no technology that wasn’t available to the Romans.
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It’s probably owing to this hiatus that the draisine gets fairly short shrift in bicycle history – it didn’t have pedals, so it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a bicycle. Yet it deserves better, because it was the breakthrough. The key to the bicycle is not really the pedals, because any fool can master that. It’s the astonishing, counterintuitive possibility of balancing on two wheels, one behind the other. That’s the bit of cycling that’s like witchcraft. It makes no sense. It ought, by rights, to be a precarious circus trick, reserved only for those with the dedication to spend months or years learning how to do it. When I learned to ride a unicycle it turned out to be only just this side of impossible. Cycling looks like it ought to be very nearly the same. Following the death of the draisine there was quite a long period of sustained, scatter-gun innovation in the field of human-powered transport that might as well have been conducted with the guiding principle that ‘you can invent anything you like, and as batty as you want, as long as it’s not a bicycle’. Substantial engineering was very much in vogue – the locomotives, the factories – and light, simple things didn’t really get the attention they deserved. The Mechanic’s Magazine and other journals featured numerous machines designed to bring the revolution of the railways to the horseless carriage. For the most part the machines were the work of amateur British tinkerers
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and artisans and not professional engineers. And almost without exception they repeated the mistakes of the servant-powered carriages. There was heavy ironmongery, and plenty of it. Few of the machines devised ever got as far as being built, which allowed flights of fancy to run unencumbered by considerations like mass and the consequent difficulties huge amounts of it might cause with gravity and inertia. ‘Mr Merryweather’s Pedomotive Carriage’ of 1839 was not atypical. It was a tricycle, with a front wheel not much bigger than a modern bicycle wheel. But the two rear wheels were appreciably taller than a man. The whole machine appears to have been over 12 feet in length. It was powered by single rider, who stood up between the rear wheels to operate treadles. God alone knows how much it must have weighed. It would be unwieldy if you reproduced it in carbon-fibre, never mind iron and wood. Treadles were the most common means of propelling one of these carriages – they had the advantage that they could, in effect, be geared up. The downside was that they were clearly decidedly tiring to operate. In the same year as Mr Merryweather offered his machine, his fellow mechanic Mr Baddeley designed what he called his Manumotive Exercising Carriage. It was on a similarly heroic scale, but powered by a seated man operating handcranks in the rear axle. The logic was that continuous
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cranking in a circular motion would provide a smoother, more efficient application of power than jumping up and down on treadles. There was force to the argument; the problem was that powering a machine of (wild guess) more than 100 kilograms over rough, rutted roads by hand must have been almost impossible. With hindsight, it seems odd that Mr Baddeley didn’t make the leap to circular pedalling. A man who did was Mr Williams. He was among the first advocates of what we now recognise as conventional pedalling – but still managed to incorporate it into a bizarre festival of engineering. Williams’s machine had two riders, one of whom pedalled standing up on the front axle, steering with his hands. His partner, well over six feet away at the machine’s rear extremity, sat down and hand-cranked the same axle via a substantial transmission-belt arrangement, while steering the other axle with his feet. This whole riot of innovation was topped with a revolving parasol, for no reason that is even remotely clear – maybe it was supposed to be a cooling fan, maybe it was intended to be a stab at some sort of slipstreamdriven perpetual-motion component, maybe it was meant to make the whole thing fly. You wouldn’t want to rule anything out where the fertile brain of Mr Williams was concerned. The whole thing was a marvel. In King of the Road, historian Andrew Ritchie describes the Williams
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Passenger Propelled Locomotive Carriage as ‘fantastic’, and he clearly means it in every sense of the word.9 Speed claims for these machines ranged anywhere from practically nothing to 30 mph. The former seems a lot more believable than the latter, at least on a level road. They would have gone faster – a lot faster – down a hill, but anyone who wanted to try that with only nineteenth-century braking technology between him and a spectacular arrival in the next world would have required more balls than the astronauts on the Apollo 11 moon mission. There was no shortage of invention and effort, and machine after machine was proposed. But the actual bicycle? Two wheels, a saddle, handlebars and some pedals? Draisine plus pedals was all we were looking for, and given both bits of technology existed, and existed together in the minds of exactly the right group of tinkerers, it took longer than you would believe to put them together. Exactly how long is, however, surprisingly unclear. Nor do we know exactly who was responsible for the magical union. It’s the grand frustration of cycling history that no one really knows when, where, and by whom the pedal and the bicycle were brought together. There have been any number of claims and counter-claims, and any amount of evidence, but when it comes down to it, we just don’t know, and it seems unlikely we ever will.
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The truth has been obscured by jingoistic myth, family loyalty, fraud, revisionism and, perhaps most of all, by the fact that whoever did first build a pedalpowered two-wheeler was not the kind of person in whom history usually takes much interest. It was not a nobleman, an aristocrat, or an inventor of the grand and documented style. It was an artisan somewhere: a blacksmith, or a carpenter, or a wheelwright. In an era before mass communication, who would ever know what an ordinary person playing around in their workshop had produced, especially if the ordinary person wasn’t worldly enough to realise what they’d created and patent it or market it? I like this very much. There is a lovely irony of the world’s greatest invention being the work of someone who history didn’t so much forget as never even notice in the first place. The bicycle is a deeply democratic object, and it’s fitting that its invention belongs to no one. (Leonardo da Vinci had nothing to do with it, by the way. He may have invented everything else, but he didn’t invent the bike. A famous sketch of a bicycle, and a relatively modern one at that, complete with a chain transmission, was found among Da Vinci’s papers in the 1970s and widely publicised. It was very quickly overturned as a fake, drawn around two pre-existing circles with a brown crayon by a forger sometime during the sometimes-chaotic restoration of the papers by Italian
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monks in the late sixties or early seventies. It was a strange design, owing to the forger having to work around other lines on the drawing. The machine in the sketch couldn’t be steered, and so couldn’t be balanced, which suggests the forger wasn’t even especially familiar with a bicycle, which would be especially embarrassing for, of all people, an Italian.10) Even if we don’t know for sure who it was, there are two or three leading contenders. The British have always promoted the idea that the inventor in question was a Scottish blacksmith called Kirkpatrick MacMillan from Courthill near Dumfries, and that the date was around 1840. The alleged machine was essentially a draisine, adapted so that the rear wheel was driven by two rods attached to treadles mounted beside the front wheel. There are two bits of evidence for this, and, frankly, they’re both pretty shaky. The first is (and there are some out there who will want to classify this under ‘they started as they intended to continue’) a court hearing in Glasgow where ‘a gentleman’ was fined five shillings for knocking down a child while riding on the pavement.11 Two pertinent questions, then. First, who was this gentleman? The newspaper report is silent on the matter, other than to say he had ridden to Glasgow from Old Cumnock, 40 miles away, in just five hours. Old Cumnock is, to be fair to the MacMillan camp, a plausible stopping-off point for a man riding the world’s
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first bicycle on his way to Glasgow from Courthill. On the other hand, several critics have questioned whether a Victorian court reporter would refer to a blacksmith as ‘a gentleman’ instead of ‘a blacksmith’. And that’s about as far as that discussion has ever got. The other question is, just what exactly was this gentleman/blacksmith sitting on while he rained down terror on the pedestrians of the Gorbals? The newspaper is vague. It refers to ‘a velocipede’, which ‘moved on wheels, turned with the hands by means of a crank’. The gaping ‘with the hands’ anomaly is normally explained away as a reporter writing ‘hands’ when he really meant ‘feet’, or misunderstanding an account of a machine he’d not actually seen personally. It seems like a stretch you’re only going to make if you’re already convinced about MacMillan’s bicycle. To me it sounds a little too much like it might be a non-mechanic’s description of how the front wheel of a draisine is turned for steering – ‘handlebar’ was hardly a word in common circulation. It certainly seems a brave leap from whatever the reporter was trying to describe to claiming proof of a bicycle. The second bit of evidence for MacMillan’s machine is some drawings, made many years later by one of his descendants who claimed to remember the bike, and a replica machine, which the same relative commissioned for a bike show in the 1890s. It’s clear that this was done largely with the intention of staking a claim for the
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family, for Dumfries, and for Scotland.12 It might have been entirely legitimate, but it’s impossible to ignore the conflict of interest. The replica was commissioned from a Thomas McCall, who had built several very similar machines in the 1860s. There were claims that those were 20-year-on copies of MacMillan’s work, and even suggestions that the true inventor was McCall himself, despite his never having made any such claim himself. To say that the situation is confusing would be an understatement. At the same time as Kirkpatrick MacMillan might, or might not, have been inventing the bicycle in Scotland, a man called Alexandre Lefebvre might, or might not, have been inventing it in France. The date, again, was around 1840, and what Lefebvre is alleged to have invented was remarkably (not to say suspiciously) similar to MacMillan’s machine, a wooden draisine of more or less equally sized wheels, with a treadle arrangement to drive the rear wheel. Lefebvre emigrated to San Francisco in 1860 at the age of 55, taking, so the story goes, a bicycle with him, a machine that was subsequently donated to a San Francisco museum. Interviewed in the 1890s, one of his old apprentices back in France claimed to have seen the bicycle built and ridden in 1843, and drew a reasonable sketch of it.13 But that’s about as far as it goes. There’s no way to prove that the bike that ended up in San Francisco
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wasn’t built after Lefebvre arrived in California, other than the pleasingly empirical observation from one historian that it appears to have been too heavily used to have been the velocipede of a man over the age of 55.14 Even by this point we’re still not nearly done with people who may or may not have invented the bike. The French have at least two more dogs in the fight, three if you want to count both of the father and son team of Pierre and Ernest Michaux. In around 1860 they attached pedals to the front-wheel axle of a draisine-type machine, and christened it the ‘Michauline’ – a name that, happily, didn’t last for very long. You’ll know what a Michaux bicycle (I point-blank refuse to call it a Michauline) looks like – they’re the things that feature at the stone-age end of those twee little ‘ages of the bicycle’ illustrations you get on birthday cards and mugs. There were dozens of design innovations and improvements, but none of them did much to fundamentally alter them, or address their shortcomings. Michaux bicycles were wooden-framed and cartwheeled, with pedals attached to the front wheel’s axle, a back wheel a little smaller than the front, and a saddle mounted above the frame on a long leaf spring to provide a primitive element of suspension. The ‘tyres’ were iron bands to protect the wooden rims. They had the twin side effects of amplifying the effect of every bump and stone in the road and of reducing grip on any hard surface
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(cobbles, say) to a minimum, so that the only escape from road-vibration was to fall off. On a softer surface neither of these was so much of a problem, but there, of course, the wheels dug into ruts and progress would be almost impossible in the first place. The third man who might, or might not, have invented the bicycle for France was an associate of the Michaux father and son, Pierre Lallement. Lallement claimed that it was really he who came up with the bicycle that was produced by the Michaux company, and that Pierre Michaux had muscled in on the credit for his invention.15 Perhaps all of, two of, one of or none of them were really responsible. Maybe they nicked if off each other, maybe they all got their heads together and nicked it from someone else altogether – Lefebvre, MacMillan, or another quiet artisan who invented the greatest machine the world has ever seen without realising what they’d done. If it really was Pierre Lallement who was responsible, it was an uncharacteristic outbreak of competence. If his sole ambition in life had been to avoid cashing in on his claim, he could hardly have spent the following few years better. In the mid-1860s the idea of the bicycle began to gather some momentum in fashionable Paris. There was a perpetual thirst for fashion and novelty, and Paris was the only place on earth where the draisine had been a
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subject of anything more than mockery and hostile bylaws. This was the perfect combination, and just the place where a man of destiny would have seen opportunity, with or without the Michaux family. So Lallement decided it was the perfect moment to emigrate to the United States and seek his fortune there. He arrived in Connecticut in 1866, took out a US patent for the bicycle the same year, and started to manufacture them. The invention was received with all the warmth with which the draisine had been greeted 40 years earlier – the machines were ridiculed. Lallement redesigned them, and they were ridiculed some more. If anyone on the entire Eastern Seaboard wanted a bicycle, Pierre Lallement certainly managed to avoid running into him. He sold his bicycle patent for a fraction of its real worth, and returned to Paris. There, of course, he found a bicycle craze in full swing, and inevitably Michaux, father and son, were in the midst of it, apparently making more money than they knew how to spend. Lallement started his own company to compete with them, calling it the Ancienne Compagnie Vélocipèdienne to try to establish some sort of prior claim via the thoroughly modern medium of a branding exercise.16 As Lallement had travelled dejectedly home from America to France, his dreams of bicycling wealth in the New World shattered, news of the bicycle craze gripping
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fashionable Paris crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction. It tripped off a similar bicycle mania on the East Coast of the US. It made the patent Lallement had all but given away into a very hot property, and, as we’ll see, it found a place at the heart of one of nineteenth-century America’s great corporations. It will probably not be greatly to your surprise to learn that, given his considerable ability to achieve commercial failure amid even the most propitious circumstances, Lallement’s Ancient Bicycle Company was not a success. The chances are that he didn’t invent the bicycle either, even if it’s tempting to decide that he did just so one can adopt a romantic view of the unworldly inventor getting done over by the wolves of commercial reality. Personally, I think the most likely of the contenders is Pierre Michaux. Michaux at least set about manufacturing something relatively rideable – unlike MacMillan and Lefebvre’s machines, you could steer a Michaux bicycle properly because there was no treadle linkage to foul the front wheel. (The only way to take a sharp corner on one of the suggested earlier machines would have been to get off, pick it up and point it in the direction you wanted to go next.) The various evolutionary stages of the bicycle through history tend to get their names retrospectively. While they’re the state of the art, they are simply bicycles. The ‘penny-farthing’ was a bicycle – only when
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the chain-driven safety appeared did it become the ‘ordinary’ and later the disparaging ‘penny-farthing’. The bicycle that the Michaux company launched on the world was the most important of them all – it may or may not have been the first bicycle, but it was the bicycle that started the sport, the pastime, the transport revolution that was cycling. That didn’t stop posterity giving it the name we have for it now, the ‘boneshaker’.
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A bumpy ride through two centuries of cycling.
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